[HERITAGE-LIST] FYI: Update on SPEAKING IN TONGUES

[Scott G. McGINNIS]

Happy Holidays! We are writing with news about Speaking in Tongues, our film about bilingualism.

This fall has been a very exciting time for our project. We expanded our scope to document the experience not only
of children learning Cantonese but also English learners in a Spanish immersion program and African American
students in San Francisco's first Mandarin immersion program. These three stories connect issues as disparate as
immigrant integration, the inequity in educational achievement, and the critical need to develop a more multicultural perspective.

We've also been tracking the development of a proposal to offer every public student in San Francisco a chance to
become bilingual—a revolutionary idea in a country where 23 states have English-only legislation on the books.
Today’s San Francisco is a harbinger for the nation itself—in 20 years, a U.S as diverse will be struggling with the
same challenges. Fortunately, we are able to document this story as it is happening, right here, right now.

Highlights of our fall production include:
• the first day of the city's first public school Mandarin immersion program—where families from the school
neighborhood’s housing projects mix with Chinese American and Caucasian students from the city's west side.
• a fabulous performance of The Barber of Seville (in English) starring a fifth grader in a Spanish immersion
school who, five years earlier, entered kindergarten speaking no English.
• an emotionally charged school board meeting where parents from across the city, voicing varied agendas, all
spoke in support of funding new immersion programs.

You can see some of this new material on our recently updated clip streaming at:
              www.patchworksfilms.net

We’ve been selected as a partner by Active Voice, a team of strategic communication specialists who leverage the
powerful human dimension of documentaries like Speaking in Tongues for institutional change. They will help us
develop and implement an ambitious national campaign to augment the work a broadcast can do.

On the funding front, we've been lucky to receive start up grants from the Film Arts Foundation, the Wallace
Alexander Gerbode Foundation, and most recently the Lenore and Howard Klein Foundation. These will keep us
moving forward into early 2007, but we need to step up our fundraising efforts to keep up with our story. We'd like
to ask all of you who can see this project’s potential to page through your palm pilots, address books, and rolodexes
and help us connect with potential funders and supporters. Anyone can make a tax-deductible contribution on our
website. Let us know if you have any interest in hosting a fundraising house party, too. We've been very successful
with this more informal approach.

In the past four months, The New York Times, USA Today, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Chicago Tribune, and
the L.A. Times have all trumpeted both the deluge of interest in learning languages like Mandarin and the challenges of educating an ever increasing number of English language learners. Our story is unfolding now, and we are
committed to following it.

Best wishes for the New Year. We look forward to hearing from you.

Marcia Jarmel and Ken Schneider
Filmmakers, Speaking in Tongues
PatchWorks Films 
663 7th Avenue
San Francisco, CA 94118 USA

(415) 387-5912 tel
(415) 203-5910 cell
www.patchworksfilms.net
ken at patchworksfilms.net
marcia at patchworksfilms.net